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Peter Dacre

Versatile journalist of the old school, with a flair for showbusiness

March 19 2003, 12:00am, The Times

PETER DACRE was a journalist who spent 36 years in Fleet Street, mostly with the Sunday Express, the end of his career coinciding with the diaspora that was to scatter the national newspapers from their traditional home. A notably energetic chairman of the Press Club in the mid-1970s, he was one of the last of a generation who would spend their working lives in the paper palaces of the press lords — in Dacre’s case, Lord Beaverbrook’s “Black Lubyanka” — toiling against a background of unreformed labour practices and constant strikes.

Dacre turned out to be a journalistic jack-of-all-trades, in a career that started with the Doncaster Gazette after he left Batley Grammar School at 16. His father was a carpenter and joiner who died…

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